From Tsuda Umeko to Ichikawa Fusae —Japan’s Liberation Movement, Running Alongside Women Across the World
(A sequel to “When Was Japanese Tradition Invented?”)
Introduction — Turning the Conventional Story Inside Out
In the preceding essay, I laid out, with reference to academic sources, the case that most of what is now called “ancient Japanese tradition” is in fact a modern invention — imported from the West during the Meiji period and dressed up as “tradition.”
Same-surname marriage, the Shinto wedding, “good wife, wise mother,” bushido, the “traditional Japanese sense of chastity” — most of these turn out to be adaptations of late-nineteenth-century Western norms, especially those of Victorian Britain and Puritan-Christian America.
Standing on those facts, I want now to think about something else: the women who fought in Japan throughout the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods.
Tsuda Umeko. Hiratsuka Raichō. Yosano Akiko. Itō Noe. Ichikawa Fusae. They are usually narrated as “pioneers who, in a backward Japan, fought against Confucian-feudal patriarchy.” Textbooks tell it this way. Most biographies tell it this way.
But was that really what was happening?
Once we have the facts established in the previous essay, the very frame of this story begins to come apart.
Whom they fought was not the longstanding tradition of Japan. It was the brand-new patriarchal-Christian modern norms that the Meiji government had just imported from the West. And they were not isolated “pioneers in a backward East” — they were comrades, running in parallel with women all over the world, fighting the same opponent at the same historical moment.
This is not a simple correction of perspective. It is a fundamental reconstruction of Japanese women’s history. Let us walk through it step by step.
1. Tsuda Umeko — She Did Not “Learn from Advanced America”
The Problem with the Standard Story
The standard story of Tsuda Umeko runs like this: “A pioneer who, seeing the advanced women’s education of America, brought it back to a backward Japan.”
But when one traces the facts chronologically, this story does not match reality.
Tsuda Umeko, in Sequence
1864 — Born in Edo
1871 (age 6) — Crosses to America as the youngest member of the Iwakura Mission
1871–1882 (eleven years) — Lives in Washington, D.C., studying at Georgetown Collegiate School and the Archer Institute
1882 (age 18) — Returns to Japan
1889 (age 25) — Returns to America to study at Bryn Mawr College — itself founded only four years earlier in 1885 — majoring in biology and education
1892 — Returns to Japan
1900 (age 36) — Founds the Joshi Eigaku Juku (now Tsuda University) in Tokyo
Fact 1 — Even in the America of That Time, Women’s Higher Education Was a New Phenomenon
Bryn Mawr College, where Tsuda Umeko studied, was founded in 1885. That is fully fourteen years after her first arrival in America in 1871. The reason for its founding aligns perfectly with the theme of this essay: it was created “for the advanced education of females” because, at the time, women could not pursue graduate-level study at existing institutions.
The life of M. Carey Thomas (1857–1935), the second president of Bryn Mawr and the figure who guided Tsuda’s later studies, symbolizes this reality.
After graduating from Cornell, Thomas applied to do graduate work at Johns Hopkins. She was refused full enrollment because she was a woman. She then studied for three years at the University of Leipzig in Germany — and was refused a degree, again, because she was a woman. Only when she learned that the University of Zürich in Switzerland would grant degrees to women was she able to receive her doctorate, summa cum laude, in 1882.
In other words: it was still impossible, at that time, for an American woman to earn a Ph.D. in America.
Fact 2 — In 1885, American Women’s Colleges Were Still Experimental Projects
Consider the founding dates of the elite women’s colleges known as the Seven Sisters:
Mount Holyoke (1837)
Vassar (1861)
Wellesley (1870)
Smith (1871)
Radcliffe (1879)
Bryn Mawr (1885)
Barnard (1889)
These were institutions that, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had only just begun offering higher education to women. By the standards of their time, they were radical and experimental.
Harvard granted its first degrees to women in 1963. Yale and Princeton admitted women only in 1969. When Tsuda was studying in America, women’s college education was something that still had to be fought for, even there.
Fact 3 — The 1900 Founding of the Joshi Eigaku Juku Was Pioneering by World Standards
When Tsuda Umeko founded the Joshi Eigaku Juku (now Tsuda University) in 1900, where did it stand on the world-historical timeline?
Fifteen years after the founding of Bryn Mawr (1885)
Eleven years after the founding of Barnard (1889)
Forty-eight years before Cambridge granted degrees to women (1948)
Sixty-three years before Harvard granted degrees to women (1963)
In other words, Tsuda’s project was not “a backward Japan catching up with advanced Europe and America.” Japan was joining the very front line where women in Britain and the United States were still fighting.
Fact 4 — Tsuda Umeko Suffered Culture Shock in Reverse
Of Tsuda’s return to Japan, Wikipedia records:
In the beginning, Umeko suffered a cultural shock and found it difficult to readjust to Japanese society and to accept the prejudices and the inferior role women were supposed to play in daily life.
This point is decisive.
As Barbara Rose has documented in Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan (Yale University Press), the Meiji government sent her to America so that she could be “trained in the lore of domesticity” — to learn how to raise children loyal and obedient to the state.
What Tsuda actually encountered in America, however, was not the ideology of domesticity, but the front line of the women’s education movement and the women’s suffrage movement. When she returned to Japan in 1882, she despaired at how far behind Japan was. Encouraged by her friend Alice Bacon, she crossed the Pacific again to study at Bryn Mawr from scratch.
Fact 5 — A Transnational Solidarity
Tsuda Umeko was part of a transnational network of the women’s education movement, alongside M. Carey Thomas, Alice Bacon, and Yamakawa Sutematsu (later Ōyama Sutematsu), who had traveled with her on the Iwakura Mission.
While at Bryn Mawr, she succeeded in raising funds to establish the “American Women’s Scholarship for Japanese Women.”
This was not a structure of “advanced America bestowing charity on a backward Japan.” It was an instance of women-to-women solidarity — American women acting for the sake of Japanese women, as comrades.
The Reversal
These facts reveal the fundamental error in the conventional narrative.
The accurate description goes like this:
In 1871, the Meiji government sent the young Ume to America to be “trained in domesticity.” But she was dropped into the very battlefield of the women’s education movement, which was still being fought even in America. There she met women like M. Carey Thomas, and what she internalized and brought home was not the ideology of domesticity but the thought of women’s liberation and intellectual independence.
What the Meiji government expected her to bring back was “the good wife and wise mother of a civilized nation.” What she actually brought back was something far more radical — women’s higher education, which not even Britain or America had yet fully secured.
So Tsuda Umeko was a figure sent abroad as part of the Meiji “civilized-nation import project,” but who, in America, stood at the front line of women who were fighting that very project. The result was that she opened the path of women’s higher education in Japan in a way that betrayed the Meiji government’s own intentions.
2. Whom They Were Really Fighting
Once we grasp the structure of Tsuda’s case, the positions of the women activists who followed her also shift fundamentally.
Whom Hiratsuka Raichō Was Fighting
When Hiratsuka Raichō wrote, in the founding manifesto of Seitō in 1911, “In the beginning, woman was the sun,” whom was she actually fighting?
She was fighting the “household” (ie) system established by the 1898 Meiji Civil Code; the “good wife, wise mother” ideology institutionalized by the 1899 Higher Girls’ School Order; the modern nation-state apparatus that, in Article 5 of the 1900 Public Peace Police Law, forbade women from joining political organizations; and the “sense of chastity” that had landed in Japan as an adaptation of the Victorian “Angel in the House.”
In other words, whom she was fighting was not the feudal residue of the Edo period. It was the brand-new ideology that the Meiji government had imported from the West only a few decades earlier.
Whom Yosano Akiko Was Fighting
When Yosano Akiko published Midaregami in 1901, with its famous verse —
yawa hada no / atsuki chishio ni / fure mo mide / sabishikarazu ya / michi o toku kimi (Without touching the warm flowing blood / of soft skin, are you not lonely, / you who lecture me about the Way?)
— the “sense of chastity” she was breaking through was not an Edo-period Japanese one.
As we saw in the previous essay, Edo-period Japan, as Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Man and The Great Mirror of Male Love attest, was an astonishingly sexually open society. Mixed bathing was ordinary, male-male love was a major literary subject, and women’s sexual subjectivity appeared frequently in literature.
The repressive sexual norms that Akiko was breaking were the brand-new Christian sexual morality — adapted from Puritan and Victorian forms — that the Meiji government had imported and was inscribing into citizens’ bodies, from the 1879 ban on mixed bathing through the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education.
Yosano Akiko was not fighting “the traditional Japanese sense of chastity.” She was fighting a brand-new repressive norm that had been imported as Victorian only a decade or two earlier.
This was the very same opponent that, in the same period in the English-speaking world, Kate Chopin (The Awakening, 1899) and Virginia Woolf would also be fighting.
Whom Itō Noe Was Fighting
When Itō Noe was killed together with Ōsugi Sakae in 1923 (the Amakasu Incident), the philosophy of free love and free marriage she embodied — was this a revolt against “Japan’s longstanding male-dominated tradition”?
No, it was not.
As the previous essay detailed, Edo-period commoners’ marriages were extremely fluid. Divorce and remarriage were frequent, childrearing was communal, and women were major workers in both merchant and farm households.
Whom Noe was fighting was the “household” system and the rights of the head-of-household (koshu-ken) that had been established by the 1898 Meiji Civil Code — and these were imports, not from Edo, but from the West, particularly from German civil law.
And here is a deeply suggestive fact: Itō Noe was translating the writings of Emma Goldman. The American anarchist-feminist Goldman, and the Japanese anarchist-feminist Noe, were fighting the same opponent — the new structure of domination that Western capitalist states had established in the latter half of the nineteenth century: modern patriarchy.
Whom Ichikawa Fusae Was Fighting
When Ichikawa Fusae fought for women’s suffrage, this is often narrated as a battle against “Japan’s traditional patriarchy.”
But the prohibition on women’s political activity in Japan had been institutionalized only recently, through the 1890 Assembly and Political Association Law and Article 5 of the 1900 Public Peace Police Law. These laws were modeled directly on the legal system of Prussian-German law — they were imports.
Emmeline Pankhurst, Susan B. Anthony, Ichikawa Fusae, Hiratsuka Raichō — they were all fighting the same patriarchal structure of the modern nation-state that had been established at the same historical moment.
The women activists of Japan were not fighting “some uniquely Eastern, backward form of oppression.” They were fighting the same global structure that women activists everywhere in the world were fighting.
3. The Double Deception of the “Confucian-Feudal Residue” Narrative
Here, the structural deception that the previous essay has been pointing to comes into sharpest focus.
The narrative that says “the oppression of women in Japan derives from Confucian-feudal tradition” is wrong in two ways.
The First Error — Factually Wrong
The Meiji structures of women’s oppression — the household system, same-surname marriage, ryōsai kenbo, the ban on women’s political activity — are not Confucian traditions. They are adaptations of Western modern norms imported by the Meiji government.
Edo-period Japan was, with respect to women, a far more open society than Victorian Britain. This is a fact already confirmed in the previous essay from multiple academic sources.
The Second Error — Politically Functional Deception
By saying, “This is the ancient Confucian tradition of Japan,” one disguises oppression that was imported and institutionalized by the Meiji state as if it were a cultural essence flowing down from antiquity.
Then the women who fight against that oppression can be marginalized as “Westernized” — as betrayers of Japanese tradition.
This is the classic political function of “invented tradition”: modern apparatuses that were imported only decades ago are disguised as “essences from time immemorial” so that resistance can be branded as “un-national” or “anti-traditional” and expelled from the discourse.
One of the most consummate examples of this technique, perfected by the Meiji state, was precisely the gender order.
4. The True Historical Place of the Women Activists
Once we see this structure, the historical place of the women activists of the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa periods is fundamentally rewritten.
The Conventional Story
Pioneers who, in a backward Japan, fought against the Confucian tradition of male supremacy. By importing the advanced women’s liberation thought of the West, they contributed to the modernization of Japanese society.
The Fact
Comrades, contemporaries of the global women’s liberation movement, fighting the patriarchal-Christian nation-state apparatus that the Meiji government had just imported from the West.
They were fighting the same enemy at the same historical moment as the women activists of Britain and America — running side by side with them.
Tsuda Umeko locking arms with M. Carey Thomas was not a structure of “backward East cooperating with advanced West.” It was a transnational solidarity among women fighting the same enemy worldwide.
5. Implications for the Present — Dismantling the “Japan Is Behind” Narrative
Once this perspective is in place, contemporary discussions of gender in Japan look completely different.
The low ranking of Japan on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index is often explained by saying, “Japan is an Asian country where Confucian tradition remains, so it is behind.”
Read through the framework of this essay, however, this is something else entirely:
It is the result of Japan having disguised the patriarchal system imported from the West in 1898 as “Japanese tradition,” and having maintained and reinforced it for more than a century thereafter.
The 1947 postwar revision of the Civil Code abolished the “household” system in law — but kept same-surname marriage. The very imports that Britain and America have been dismantling through the second half of the twentieth century, Japan has preserved as “Japaneseness.”
Japan’s gender gap, in other words, is not a problem of “Asian tradition.” It is a problem of the museum-like preservation of nineteenth-century Western norms.
6. Redefining “Japaneseness”
Here, the core of the structural reversal traced through these two essays comes into the open.
What the conservative discourse of “defending Japaneseness” defends is, in fact, the nineteenth-century Western norms imported by the Meiji government.
Meanwhile, the directions of contemporary feminism, LGBTQ movements, and other movements criticized as “impositions of Western values” are, in fact, structurally closer to the fluidity and openness of Edo-period Japan.
And the Japanese women activists — Tsuda Umeko, Itō Noe, Hiratsuka Raichō, Yosano Akiko, Ichikawa Fusae — were not “Westernized betrayers of Japanese tradition.”
They were people who fought, side by side with their comrades around the world, against the oppression that the Meiji government had imported from the West.
That is their true historical position.
Conclusion — A Resonating Structure
In the previous essay, I demonstrated that much of what is now called “Japanese tradition” is an adaptation of Western modern norms imported during the Meiji period.
In this essay, I have shown that the Japanese women who fought against those imported norms were not isolated “pioneers” but comrades running in parallel with the women’s movements of the world.
What emerges from this is a single resonating structure.
The deep layer of pre-Edo Japan — fluidity, coexistence, plurality, sexual openness, separate surnames, communal childrearing — and contemporary global liberation movements — gender diversity, fluid family forms, freedom of sexual expression — resonate structurally with each other, across the divide of the patriarchal-Christian modern norms that were imported during the Meiji period.
What we feel to be “progressive” is, in fact, close to an older Japan. What we feel to be “Japanese” is, in fact, close to a recently imported norm.
The moment one perceives this resonance across time and space, the entire landscape of contemporary discourse undergoes a fundamental change.
“Conservative vs. liberal,” “East vs. West,” “tradition vs. modernity” — at a deeper level, the foundations of these binaries are dismantled. What appears in their place is a richer and freer horizon of possibility.
That horizon, I suspect, is what Tsuda Umeko and her companions were already seeing.
Major References
Tsuda Umeko and Modern Japanese Women’s Education
Rose, Barbara. Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Furuki, Yoshiko. The White Plum: A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women. New York: Weatherhill, 1991.
Nimura, Janice P. Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Bryn Mawr College Archives. “Tsuda Umeko Collection.” https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/bmc-rg12-fj-tsuda
M. Carey Thomas and Women’s Higher Education in the United States
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Bryn Mawr College. “College History & Legacies.” https://www.brynmawr.edu/about-college/college-history-legacies
Modern Japanese Women’s Movements and Gender History
Bardsley, Jan. The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007.
Mackie, Vera. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Bernstein, Gail Lee (ed.). Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Sievers, Sharon L. Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.
Tomida, Hiroko. Hiratsuka Raichō and Early Japanese Feminism. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Itō Noe and Anarchist Feminism
Raddeker, Hélène Bowen. Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: Patriarchal Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies. London: Routledge, 1997.
Kurihara, Yasushi. Set the Village on Fire, Become an Idiot: A Life of Itō Noe (Mura ni hi o tsuke, hakuchi ni nare: Itō Noe den). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2016.
Global History of Feminism
Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Victorian and Nineteenth-Century Women’s History (Anglo-American Side)
Vicinus, Martha. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Online Sources
Nippon.com. “Tsuda Umeko: A Life Dedicated to Women’s Higher Education.” https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/b07228/
Britannica. “M. Carey Thomas.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/M-Carey-Thomas
Bryn Mawr College. “The 19th Amendment and Bryn Mawr College.” https://www.brynmawr.edu/bulletin/19th-amendment-bryn-mawr-college
Foundational Works Cited in the Previous Essay (also referenced here)
Hobsbawm, Eric & Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Vlastos, Stephen (ed.). Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Koyama, Shizuko. Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Hardacre, Helen. Shinto and the State, 1868–1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Ministry of Justice, Civil Affairs Bureau, Japan. “The Evolution of the Surname System in Japan.” https://www.moj.go.jp/MINJI/minji36-02.html